Thank you.
First off, I'd like to say good afternoon to the committee and thank you for the opportunity to come and speak before you today.
As Mr. Simms said, my name is Tony Doyle. I am an inshore fish harvester from the 3L region. I currently serve as the inshore vice-president for the FFAW. It's a position I've held since 2014.
I was born and raised in the small fishing community of Bay de Verde, which is located at the northern tip of the Avalon Peninsula. Right now, we have approximately 400 people in the community living here. My community is a fishing community, and most working-age people in the community are either fish harvesters or were employees at the Quinlan Brothers processing plant, which burned down this spring, on April 11, and is now in the process of being rebuilt. There's a new steel building going up, 640 feet long by 85 feet wide, so it looks good for the future of our community, that rebuilding of the plant. Without this valuable fishery, this inshore fishery, our community has no real future. It's why people came to Bay de Verde in the 1600s and why we've been clinging to cliffs ever since.
I started fishing in 1970 on summer breaks while I was still in school, at the tender young age of 12 years, and at the time I fished in a 28-foot trap boat, which most people did. In 1975, when I got out of school, I got into the fishery full time with my father and uncle. I fished that boat, that 28-foot trap skiff, right up until the late 1990s, due to the fact that I had it fibre-glassed the year of the moratorium in 1992. Now I'm fishing in a 34'11'' boat, which is used primarily to catch crab. I also fish cod with that boat, and I fish lobster and cod with a 20-foot speedboat.
I don't profess to know everything about the cod fishery, but I do know a fair bit. I've been around the water all my life, and I have a fair bit of understanding of some of the changes that occurred and that have been occurring. Back in the late 1980s, in 1988-90, we had three of the best years that we've had in cod fishing, with cod traps and gillnets. Those were the highest earnings that I had received up to that point.
There were plenty of fish on the grounds, of good size and good quality, and the capelin fishery was what we've called “normal” for a hundred years, I suppose. It landed in our area on the beaches around the middle of June. Some time before the June 20, between June 10 and June 20, was the normal regular time for capelin to land. The cod traps would go in the water a few days before, when we would see the signs, and then we had a six-week cod fishery, right up to the last of July. Then the traps came in. Then we went gillnetting for a few weeks, and then into the handline fishery into September and October.
In 1991 things started to change. We had ice in our community, in our harbour, right up until late June, I think. I took a picture. I have it at home somewhere. I couldn't find it to bring it in, but there was ice in our bay on June 9 of that year, and lo and behold, the cod didn't show up, and the capelin didn't show up until well into August. Whatever happened with the environment, with the water temperatures, everything went out of whack for a number of years, right?
In the winter of 1992 we got ready, but there were rumours that the fishery might close and there were no cod. We still had to get ready and go fishing. We had two cod traps in the water that we put out around June 10. When the announcement came on July 2, I hadn't caught one cod up till that time. We took in the gear within the time frame that was allowed, within four or five days. That year, the capelin showed up around the last week in August, almost two months late. They were small and only there for a little while, and then they were gone again.
It was a very difficult year for everybody, being out of work and trying to deal with family and financial issues and everything. Some people had a difficult time, and some of us did okay and pulled through.
In the years following the moratorium, I fished lobster, squid, and lumpfish, low-value fisheries and therefore low-income, but I did supplement the income that I was getting from NCARP for the closure of the cod.
At that time, in the early 1990s, there were virtually no cod out on the fishing grounds. Out where we normally went to get codfish, out on the shoals, there were no cod. Any cod that was around was tight to the shoreline, right in the land marshes almost, and of small size. For three or four years, I don't know if I saw a fish here that was over 20 inches.
Then the fish started to pick up. They started to increase. We saw some increases in size and in abundance. Certainly, we lobbied to get a fishery open. We were eager to get back even though we had crab, but we only had small amounts of crab, small quotas. We were eager to get back fishing and get at it. Now, in hindsight, I think we all realize that was a mistake. The stock hadn't recovered enough. We started fishing cod too early, and within a couple of years we were back into a downturn and closed it off again.
It's also important to understand that during this time the capelin still didn't land. The capelin weren't coming in when they normally did. I remember that about six or seven years ago we fished capelin with capelin traps, a friend of mine and I, with our crews, and July 21 was the first day that we landed capelin, which was still at that time four or five weeks late.
Since then, the capelin have started to move back into a normal mode. For the last four years, not counting this year, they landed in that mid-June time frame, but this year they were a month late again. I can't understand what happened this year, because water temperatures have been good, and actually quite a bit higher than what they were normally were. Through the 1980s surface temperatures were in the five-, six-, and seven-degree range through the summer. I took part in some tagging through the FFAW in the last few years, and water temperatures are up to a 15-degree surface temperature in late June, right through to now. We're in a warming trend, which is not good for shellfish but is more favourable for codfish.
In the past 10 years, like I said, the timing has started to improve. The capelin are arriving earlier, and therefore so do the cod. Cod has been quite plentiful over the last 10 years in our area. We had a guy doing sentinel fishing in Bay de Verde. Through the 1980s, when we fished with gillnets, the average catch was anywhere from 50 pounds to 100 pounds for catch on a 24-hour soak. Pull the nets today, set them back in the water, and pull them again tomorrow, and you're doing real well if you get 100 pound of net. The sentinel fishermen in Bay de Verde in the last number of years were getting anywhere from 500 to 1,000 pounds of net on a 24-hour soak.
We now have fishermen setting nets in the late evening, five or six o'clock, for a 12-hour soak. I talked to one guy last week, and from a 12-hour soak he had 1,600 pounds out of two cod nets. That was unheard of in the eighties, or rare, just every now and then.
The other thing that's happened is that through the eighties we couldn't catch fish in gillnets during the day. This year I set nets, the first year since we've been fishing with this quota. I've always fished with handlines, but this year I tried with the nets. The reason I did it was that I was fishing with handlines and getting 100% grade A, and I wanted to see if I could get 100% grade A, or what I could get, out of gillnets. I set in the morning and pulled back three hours later. Out of three nets, I got 600 to 900 pounds in three hours' fishing during the day. That was unheard of in my time, and even in my father's time fishing. Gillnets came to Newfoundland in the sixties. The first couple of years there were big catches, but then after that it went back to 100 pounds in the net.
I just wanted to let you know that things have improved with the fish in the last number of years. There's a lot of large cod and plentiful and healthy fish. When I was handlining, there was no trouble catching them. Another guy—my crew member—and I would be able to catch 1,500 pounds in three hours with one baited hook each.